Unofficial Spiceworks

Spread-Spiceworks.org.uk (a Unofficial Spiceworks site) has just released some Service Provider (MSP) badges for use on your company website.

Spread-Spiceworks was originally a very rubbish website until about 4 months ago when I picked up an idea i started ages ago. It now provides community members with dynamic badges they can use on there websites, email, forums and more to promote Spiceworks and gain points.

This morning it grew some more with the addition of MSP badges, a growing percentage of community users are from MSP companies and using these badges could help draw in some business, or points in the community or both. With 6 designs to choose from and more coming soon you should find something you like.

Checkout the other designs on Spread-Spiceworks.org.uk today!

Thanks to Lawrie5252 for helping with the designs and coming up with the idea.

The post that opened Spiceworks-News was this time last year, taking 2 weeks for Spiceworks to find it and to declare what a big hit it was.

Since then we have changed our name to Unofficial Spiceworks and we have gone from having a blue coloured theme to a Spiceworks Orange one.

So what have we ( well I ) done in the year?

• 150+ unique visitors a day
• ~50 returning visitors a day
• 18 Google subscribers
• 300+ Track able referrals + countless none track able
• 360+ posts (just under one a day)
• 30+ Categories
• 130+ comments
• 840+ tweets
• Made it into the Spiceworks monthly update email twice
• Got 120+ links back to us
• Got 3 guest posts by Justin Dorfman
• Was the inspiration for SpiceworksLounge.com the Hebrew Spiceworks site

With some outstanding and loved posts like

• How good can support for FREE software be?
• Ups and Downs of working in the social media / community world
• HTML Email Templates
• All the latest beta and sneak peak reviews and info
• The invention of SpiceRex who made it to America

As well as then creating Let Me Spiceworks Search That For You and working hard on the community to answer questions.

I know were not the biggest blog but its not bad?

So what’s to come?

Well my plan as with any website is to continue to grow. Some key things coming up will be:

• New logo and slogan, this has been in the works for a while. I will be shorty posting up more information about this and how you can get involved.
• A new theme? Maybe, Maybe not… not sure on that one.
• The closure off spread-spiceworks.org.uk, this was the inspiration for Unofficial Spiceworks but quickly found it copied too much off the official Spread Spiceworks area and recently ended up being a holding page with not a lot of info or visits. I’m in the process of deciding if I want to port the theme on to Unofficial Spiceworks. Either way in the coming months the site will just redirect to here.
• Better insider information, hopefully I can try and wiggle my way into Spiceworks HQ more this year to get some more information to you first.
• More guest posts, from doing things in the community to making plugin’s, what ever people want to talk about. If you want to guest post drop me a email via the the contact form or add a comment anything Spiceworks related.
• Work on my spealing, I know its really bad at times, I’m working on it…

And thank you

Too all the readers for continuing to read

It’s what makes it worth while.

And as always if you have any comments or suggestions for this site drop me a email via the contact form or add a comment

Birthday wishes from SpiceworksLounge.com

Thanks Yasaf and SpiceworksLounge.com for their Happy Birthday Post

Unofficial Spiceworks is celebrating its first  birthday today!  Launched just a year ago Unofficial Spiceworks quickly became the best source for Spiceworks community news. Andy is doing FANTASTIC job spreading the word by bringing us Spiceworks news and reviews from the underground

Read the whole post on SpiceworksLounge.com

So you may have seen Spicerex mentioned on these forums before, he was invented for the Show the World your Spiciness as something fun and creative, but he got lose and have invaded Spiceworks offices.

Somehow Spicerex has escaped from the Show the World your Spiciness contest and has made his way across the Atlantic. Since arriving here in the US, he has setup shop in the Spiceworks offices. Here are a few pictures of him making himself at home. We first found him raiding the candy bowl.

Read Nic’s news post here

So what did Spicerex get up to on his trip to Texas?

Read More…

Unofficial Spiceworks has just released a new website to help people find and use the search function on the Spiceworks community, called Let Me Spiceworks Search That For You it is a simple Let Me Google That For You clone which moves the mouse to the search box and enters the search term for the user.

It has the built in function to also hide the URL or shorten it which ever sounds better. It is currently still under development some and things may change. I know I need to work on the stats page.

Check it out now at http://lmswstfy.com/ and let me know what you think or what should be changed / improved.

Relationship to Spiceworks

In simple there is NONE. This website was designed and made without any Spiceworks involvement or knowledge.

You can see my personal involvement with Spiceworks on Unofficial Spiceworks.

So what was this website built for?

This website was setup to help people find and use the search function on the Spiceworks Community.

When should I use this site?

When you find a noobie posting a question which has been asked lots of times before or is something simple and in the users face, OR for anything a Spiceworks Staff guy says… there always wrong.

When should I NOT use this site?

When the user is really struggling and has said they have looked or tried some links and NEVER give it to akp982 hell kill you.

I want to stop getting these links sent to me.

Yours the fricking search then!!!

Check it out now at http://lmswstfy.com/

Update: LMSWSTFY mentioned on Hebrew Site SpiceworksLounge.com http://www.spiceworkslounge.com/index.php/2010/04/523 – Translated http://oots.be/10h

Happy easter to every SpiceHead, SpiceStaff and SpicePartner

Unofficial Spiceworks hopes you got lots of chocolate and are having a eggcellent weekend.

Spiceworks-News has grown, with new content ideas we have decided to change our name and branding to Unofficial Spiceworks.

There are many reasons for this including making it easier for people to work out what is Unofficial News and Official News.

We have also updated our Twitter account to reflect this we are now called UnofficialSpice this is because of the 15 character limit for usernames.

We hope with this new change Unofficial Spiceworks can become bigger, better and stronger.

Our new domain is http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/ and all old links will automatically redirect.

If you have any comments or suggests feel free to use the contact us page or leave a comment.

After talking to Craig M via PM for a bit, he asked:

Hope you don’t my my asking (and if you do you don’t have to answer)…do you actually make money off the two blogs that you run about Spiceworks?

My reply to this was along the lines off:

No problem…

The ads gain me around 50p a month… so no way NEAR, its almost pointless having them on there.

So nope… not a penny

So from this I took action and dropped the adverts. Well ok every now and then I may throw up a Spiceworks one or one for another of my sites.

Spiceworks-News is now held up out off my love for the peppers and the joy I get out of being able to get news up before Spiceworks can.

Just to make it clear though, unofficialspiceworks.com is not run or part of Spiceworks.com, its run independently by me (akp982) and just because Spiceworks-News has gone ad free does not mean Spiceworks will…

The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

Read More…